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How a Japanese Empress Inspired an American Literary Prince

By most standards John Burnham Schwartz enjoyed a charmed start to his writing life. His first novel, “Bicycle Days,” about a young Yale graduate who goes to live in Japan, grew out of his senior thesis at Harvard and was published on his 24th birthday, to strong reviews and a shower of attention.

But in the aftermath of that early success in 1989, he stumbled. He moved to Paris and spent two years working on a novel that has yet to be published. He fell into the grips of depression and began taking medication for it. “There is something about getting exposed publicly before you know who you are,” the still-boyish-looking Mr. Schwartz, now 42, said recently, sitting in his garretlike study at the top of a brick town house in Brooklyn.

Mr. Schwartz went on to regain literary success as well as a happy domestic life. But something about that early cocktail of emotions is echoed in “The Commoner,” his latest novel, which is being published Tuesday by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.

Told from the point of view of a fictional doppelgänger for Empress Michiko of Japan, the book traces the story of how the first commoner to marry into the Japanese imperial family was, at the age of 24, exposed to brutal public scrutiny and the unyielding rigors of royal life, robbing her of her identity and sending her into a crushing depression.

Granted, an early debut in the limelight aside, Mr. Schwartz, a white, boarding school-educated American man with unlimited freedoms and few qualms about anatomizing his emotional vulnerabilities, has little in common with a royal Japanese consort who has virtually no autonomy and lives a life of tragic reserve. He embraced the disjunction, although he sometimes questioned his ambitions.

“I had to stop a couple of times and say, ‘Am I insane?’ ” said Mr. Schwartz, who is tall and retains a full head of honey-tinged locks. Dressed in jeans, a blue-striped button-down shirt and brown ankle boots, he looked like the prep-school squash star he once was. “So different were the lives I was writing about from my own, and such a leap was required to inhabit these voices or characters,” he said, “that I had to pause and think, ‘How am I going to pull this off?’ ”

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John Burnham SchwartzCredit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

With a quiet layering of details, “The Commoner” follows Haruko Endo from her childhood through a heady courtship by the crown prince. When she marries him, Haruko begins a life of miserable isolation in which not even her children are truly her own. In the book’s final quarter Haruko sees her life reflected in the suffering of her daughter-in-law, Keiko (modeled on the real-life Crown Princess Masako), also a commoner who marries into the royal family.

The idea that the life of the empress might make a compelling novel first occurred to Mr. Schwartz a decade ago, when a family friend, the children’s book editor Margaret K. McElderry, published a collection of Japanese poems translated by Empress Michiko. After the publication Ms. McElderry met with the empress in Japan and told Mr. Schwartz how the empress had quizzed her about her life.

“It was almost as though the empress were asking about a life that, under different circumstances, might have been her own,” said Mr. Schwartz, who speaks in the long, clause-rich sentences that punctuate his writing. “It made me aware of an imagination still going on in her, and at the center of that imagination a sense — probably a deep sense — of loss.”

Something about that insight embedded itself in Mr. Schwartz’s mind. He went on to write the well-reviewed “Reservation Road” (1998), about a fatal hit-and-run accident and how it affects those left behind, and “Claire Marvel” (2002), a romance set at Harvard, as well as 400 pages of another novel he abandoned.

Just over three years ago he secured a book deal with a five-page proposal for what became “The Commoner.” He read books and news articles and trolled the Internet for details about the empress’s life. The factual contours — her education at a convent school; summers spent in Karuizawa, a resort town where she met the crown prince on a tennis court; and an episode of depression following the birth of her first son, when she lost her voice for several months — all appear in the book.

Then the novelist took over. “You can keep connecting her to real life through any number of historical details, but you are writing about a person who does not otherwise exist,” Mr. Schwartz said. At one point he traveled to Japan for more research. Through connections he landed lunches with a childhood friend of the empress and with the emperor’s grand chamberlain, a senior adviser.

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The author John Burnham Schwartz in his Brooklyn home.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

At lunch with the grand chamberlain, Mr. Schwartz explained his project. The chamberlain offered to help, and Mr. Schwartz replied, “What I really want to know is, what colors are the carpets?” The chamberlain laughed but did not answer.

Doubleday has already gone back to press once, taking the total copies in print to 30,000. Sessalee Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, said she expected the novel to sell well. “I love that he takes us behind the curtain of Japan’s royal family and really brings to life some of the most enigmatic women of our time,” Ms. Hensley wrote in an e-mail message.

With its Japanese theme (and white storyteller), the comparison to Arthur Golden’s best-selling “Memoirs of a Geisha” is inescapable. “The Commoner” is “a kind of sequel, if you will, to ‘Memoirs of a Geisha,’ ” said Steve Shapiro of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan.

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Like Mr. Golden, Mr. Schwartz enjoyed a privileged childhood. His father, Alan U. Schwartz, is an entertainment lawyer whose clients included Dustin Hoffman and David Halberstam (who became a mentor and to whose memory “The Commoner” is dedicated, along with Mr. Schwartz’s wife, Aleksandra Crapanzano, and their 23-month-old son, Garrick). His mother, Paula Merwin, was a children’s book editor who married the poet W. S. Merwin after parting from Mr. Schwartz’s father. After Harvard Mr. Schwartz flirted briefly with a career in investment banking before selling “Bicycle Days” for a $25,000 advance. The dark period in his 20s notwithstanding, his publishing history has been, as he is first to admit, lucky.

Not without its sensitive spots, however. When “Reservation Road,” his second novel, was made into a movie that was released last year, his screenplay was substantially reworked by the director, Terry George. Despite the presence of Joaquin Phoenix, Jennifer Connelly and Mark Ruffalo in lead roles, the movie was critically slammed and sank at the box office.

Mr. Schwartz winced while talking about it, defending the stars’ performances. “I have gotten a lot out of the movie,” he insisted, noting that he has secured a new screenwriting gig, writing a script for Denzel Washington based on the life of First Sgt. Charles Monroe King, who was killed in Iraq and kept a journal for his young son. Sergeant King was the fiancé of Dana Canedy, an editor at The New York Times.

With the screenwriters’ strike Mr. Schwartz is back to novels. He is preparing to tour for “The Commoner” and has begun a novel that will pick up 12 years after the end of “Reservation Road.” In any case, “the screenwriting satisfaction ends about here,” he said, drawing his hand across his neck. “And then there’s the whole sort of middle of your body where the mysterious stuff goes on, that you wouldn’t trade for anything in the world and that you only get from doing the work that’s most personal and deepest to you.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: How a Japanese Empress Inspired an American Literary Prince. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe